The invisible homeless of Montreal’s suburbs (VIDEO)

WITH VIDEO: The West Island, Laval and South Shore are more associated with lawns and malls than with food banks and shelters. But that doesn’t mean everyone has a roof over their heads.

News Desk

Updated: May 24, 2014

OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE: Carol-Ann Ouellette talks about what it was like for her to live on the street as a woman, at the Action jeunesse de l’Ouest-de-l'Île (AJOI) office where she's a client, in Ste-Geneviève. (Phil Carpenter / THE GAZETTE)

MONTREAL — Behind the manicured lawns, in-ground swimming pools and two-car garages in Montreal’s suburbs lies a growing problem, invisible to all but the few community organizations struggling to meet the demand of those in need.

A combination of rising food and utility prices, lack of affordable housing and jobs that pay no more than minimum wage is eroding stability from Laval to Longueuil to Île-Perrot, forcing some to sleep in their cars, share questionable digs with others or, as the temperatures warm up, pitch a tent in a forest or field.

They are known as the “hidden homeless,” the faceless people — youth, new immigrants and women among them — who don’t use downtown emergency shelters but supplement a meagre welfare cheque by scavenging through Dumpsters, and spend their days wandering vast shopping malls.

“What is new is the size and diversity of homelessness,” says Lucie Latulippe, who runs Longueuil’s two shelters, which are able to house a total of 19 men and women at a time. “We have more and more new people coming from everywhere — the Montérégie, other provinces and the rest of Quebec.”

For every 700 people L’abri de la Rive Sud and La Maison Elisabeth Bergeron are able to house a year, another 1,200 are turned away, Latulippe said.

Because the large majority of homeless people find themselves in the situation for just a short period of time, and usually brought on by a crisis in their lives, such as a divorce or sudden job loss, it’s hard to know just how widespread the problem is in Montreal or other Canadian cities. Only a small minority are known to be chronically homeless.

But the first national report card on homelessness, released last year by the Canadian Homelessness Research Network and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, estimated at least 200,000 Canadians use homeless emergency services or sleep outside in a given year, although the actual number could be quite a bit higher, since many people shack up with friends or relatives and don’t use other resources — the so-called hidden homeless.

(A 2009 Vancouver study estimated for every one known homeless person, another 3.5 were hidden.)

The report card found that across Canada, at least 30,000 people are homeless on a given night, which costs the country’s economy an estimated $7.05 billion per year in emergency shelters, social services, health care and police interventions.

Drowned out during the Quebec election campaign by all the charter chatter and sovereignty talk was the Parti Québécois’s action plan on homelessness — an ambitious approach that promised, among other things, much-needed social housing.

Earmarked in the previous government’s 2014-15 budget was money for 3,250 social housing units, of which 500 were reserved for the homeless. Another $6 million was to go toward decentralizing health and social services.

The party, which was defeated at the polls in April, had promised by next month an up-to-date portrait of the province’s homelessness problem, something that hasn’t been done in almost 20 years.

Now with the governing Liberals preparing an “austerity budget,” organizations working with the homeless are worried that all the work they put into last June’s consultation forum on homelessness — a first in the province with input from some 140 organizations — will be for naught.

“We had a lot of confidence in (former premier Pauline) Marois’s homelessness policy, but we don’t know if the Liberals will follow through,” said Émilie Rouleau of l’Écluse des Laurentides, an organization that has 11 street workers in eight Laurentian municipalities between Mont-Tremblant and St-Jérôme. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and worry.”

Latulippe, too, is concerned, saying the Liberal government doesn’t seem to recognize the extent of the problem.

“We have a lot of grey zones and holes in services,” she said. “And there is a lot of anxiety due to the economy.”

But Lucie Charlebois, the Liberal minister of rehabilitation, youth protection and public health, which includes homelessness, said the PQ didn’t have a monopoly on “heart and passion” and that her party promises that an action plan will be put together as fast as possible, hopefully by the beginning of winter.

“The phenomenon is serious and is changing in that more women are affected and it is growing in outlying regions,” she said in a brief telephone interview during which she stressed that the Liberals are committed to solving the problem.

Benoît Langevin runs a West Island organization whose staff does 12,000 hours of intervention annually (there are 8,760 hours in a year) to try to combat what he calls “the dirty little secret” of suburban homelessness, especially among youth, in an area more associated with wealth than food banks.

“The weirdest paradox in the West Island is we have a lot of money, there’s a lot of wealthy families, but we can’t take care of our neighbours,” Langevin said. “Unless you dig and scratch to see it, you won’t see it because it’s indoors, it’s in an apartment, it’s in a house and until that door is open, you don’t see it.”

Langevin is trying to convince his local MNAs to get behind building the first shelter in the West Island. (Although Langevin doesn’t want to call it a shelter because of the stigma attached to being homeless. He’d rather it be a hostel, where young people could pay $30 or $40 a night, or be referred from the health care system and stay for free.) And he’s lobbying to get existing services decentralized, to prevent the suburban homeless population from migrating to Montreal, where life on the streets can be rougher and more dangerous.

“All the resources are downtown, which to me is a mistake because homelessness should be dealt with in the community, where people should stay,” he said, sitting on the sunny balcony of the no-frills office of West Island Youth Action, above a Matelas Bonheur in picturesque Ste-Geneviève. “Your mom is still there even though you have problems, your peers and immediate network is there so you can still find a way to re-grab the wheel and go back into society faster than if you’re all over the place.”

Suburban governments could also do more to help their poor and homeless, from improved and affordable transportation to food banks, to employment and other services, Langevin noted.

To prove his point to politicians about the extent of the taboo subject of homelessness, especially among youth, in the western suburbs, Langevin, with the help of sociology master’s students at the Université du Québec à Montréal, decided to gather the evidence through a study funded by the city of Montreal. He went to an adult high school diploma class in the Les

ter B. Pearson School Board and asked the students how many of them were homeless.

Not one of the 30 students raised a hand.

“But when we asked, ‘Have there been times when you didn’t have a place to crash?’ — everybody, 30 kids, raised their hands,” Langevin said.

“We found that you can also be from a wealthy family and end up on the street because no one is protected from a bad divorce or uninvolved parents,” Langevin said. “In the West Island, it’s contagious.

“Parents are working two jobs trying to pay the mortgage and keep up the dream.”

One of the most surprising results of Langevin’s study, a report to be published next month, was that 70 per cent of renters in the prosperous suburb of Baie d’Urfé are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent — a red flag for poverty.

In January 2007, the Canadian Council on Social development reported that “almost one-quarter of Canadian households — more than 2,700,000 households — are paying too much of their income to keep a roof over their heads.” And the 2013 State of Homelessness in Canada report found that roughly 380,600 households were spending more than 50 per cent of their income on rent.

That housing insecurity is what led to a shelter called l’Aviron opening two years ago in Laval and helping between 700 and 800 men and women in the suburb north of Montreal.

“So if that’s how many we’ve had, imagine how many are out there,” said l’Aviron’s director, Sandrine Gaudelet.

The shelter — the only one of its kind in Laval — offers six emergency beds, six transitional beds for stays of as long as six months, six studio apartments for stays lasting as long as a year, plus a dozen two-and-a-half apartments for up to three years. The goal is to help people reintegrate into society as quickly as possible.

“Here, homelessness is more situational, caused by a lost job or leaving a spouse, so it’s not chronic but it can still last a few years,” Gaudelet said. No one is immune, she added. “We had one man with us who was doing his master’s and at one point, he just couldn’t afford to pay his rent.”

According to Raising the Roof, a Toronto-based organization fighting homelessness, Canada’s “new homeless” population is more diverse than ever: almost one-third are age 16 to 24, and nearly one in seven people who use emergency shelters across Canada are children. New arrivals and aboriginals are also in precarious housing situations.

Travail de rue de l’ile de Laval (TRIL), which helps youth age 12 to 21 who have no fixed address, is seeing the effects of increased financial pressure on families. With neither time nor money on their hands to catch their breath, let alone enjoy time together just having fun, tensions rise.

“We have more and more youth in that situation,” director Carol Paré said in an interview. “Most are youth who have been raised by parents who themselves are in difficulty and can’t feed their kids, let alone teach them how to manage the responsibilities of life.”

She said often youths will “couch-surf” — crash on a friend’s couch for a night or two — or six youths will share a four-and-a-half and spend half of their welfare cheque on their allotted space in the apartment. And with many of them dealing with drug and alcohol addiction, mental health issues and the baggage of having been through the child welfare system, it can often make for an explosive household, Paré added.

“We had one situation where (a group of youths living together) spent three months with no hot water because Hydro-Québec had shut off the power,” she said.

Of the 70 young people TRIL is helping these days, 15 don’t have a roof over their heads, others are on the verge of homelessness and half don’t have a relationship with their family.

Many organizations report that most of the youths they help are those who have grown up in foster and group homes and have few tools to deal with life.

Carol-Ann Ouellette says she was lucky to come across West Island Youth Action to pull her out of homelessness. She started using at age 9, and set the stage for a life in youth protection. On the streets of Montreal, mostly around Ste-Catherine and Bleury Sts., she scavenged with other youth, her weight dropping to a scrawny 92 pounds.

By the time she was referred to Langevin’s organization by a sympathetic Emploi-Québec employee who’d heard about the organization’s work, she “felt dead inside” and wanted to kill herself.

Now, the 20-year-old has a small, two-room apartment in Terrebonne, is finishing high school and hopes to go to CEGEP and university. Still, it’s a struggle to make ends meet. Her rent gobbles up $564 of the $700 she receives every month from Emploi-Québec for going back to school.

What West Island Youth Action gives her is the feeling that, finally, someone cares. She has put on weight, freckles dot her clear-skinned face and large dimples appear when she breaks into a smile.

“We’re not junkies or alcoholics just because we’re on the street,” she said. “We’re good people. If you even just smile at us, when we go to sleep we’ll remember that.”

While the visible homeless who dot Montreal’s streets and the doorways of its métro stations are still predominantly men, organizations in the suburbs note a growing diversity among their ranks, with immigrants, women, young people and the well-educated and under-employed equally susceptible to losing what everyone needs to feel part of society: a fixed address.

“It’s not like it was before, it’s not just people who can’t read or write or are alcoholic,” said Gaudelet, of l’Aviron in Laval. “It’s people like you and me who are in precarious situations.”

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